Die Zeitschrift Technikgeschichte behandelt das Thema „Täuschung und Illusion“ in Kooperation mit dem Jahrbuch Technikphilosophie (jtphil.nomos.de). Zu diesem Themenfeld erscheinen sowohl im Jahrbuch Technikphilosophie 2025 als auch im vorliegenden Heft Beiträge, um das Thema komplementär aus philosophischer und historischer Perspektive zu betrachten.

This article presents a new way of understanding Global Environmental Governance (GEG), historically and functionally. We outline a revised analytical framing, which connects the post-WWII moment of early globalizing conservation with the intensifying attempts to govern the human-earth relationship through an ever-growing assemblage of governable environmental objects and their quantifiable indicators as proxies. Our argument is as follows: (1) GEG has followed a trajectory of dispersal of actors, institutions, conceptual tools and responsibilities from the micro- and local scales to the planetary. We analyze how these trajectories unfold in three essential domains: Earth System science, sovereignty, and neoliberalization. (2) GEG is performative. The governance itself has created the dynamic environmental objects under governance. (3) In this way, GEG has normalized the environment as a policy object.

Das Neue zieht an. Jede Generation lache über alte Moden, folge aber treu den Neuen, meinte Henry David Thoreau schon Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts zu wissen. Gemäß dem Entwicklungsgedanken von Zivilisationsgeschichte als Geschichte des Fortschritts und der Verbesserung erneuern sich die menschlichen Lebensbedingungen in immer schnelleren Zyklen. Die Begeisterung für technische Modernisierung und Innovation blieb nicht allein den Ingenieurswissenschaften vorbehalten. Historisch haben sich auch Teile der Technikgeschichtsschreibung an der Beschleunigung berauscht und dazu beigetragen, dass Technikentwicklung als innovationsgetrieben erschien. Aber ist das Neue immer notwendig und erstrebenswert? Wie wird der Imperativ des Neuen begründet? Das Themenheft "Sog des Neuen" greift ein klassisches Thema der Technikgeschichte auf, die Analyse und Reflexion des technischen Wandels. Die Beiträge sollen dazu anregen, über Technikentwicklung, Technikzukünfte und Technikfolgen ebenso wie über die Zeitlichkeiten von Technik selbst nachzudenken.

Over the past half century, the global environment has become subject to an accelerated pace of mediation and datafication. This ongoing transition has become so comprehensive that the knowledge, management and governance of the Earth system is dependent on enormous flows of data from a “vast machine” of measuring tools. These processes combined have formed what we call a “mediated planet,” subject to interpretation and shared human decision-making – that should ideally be democratic, inclusive and accountable. As environmental datafication continues to accelerate, private corporations are gaining increasing influence on and power over the associated collections of data. This is a cause for concern, as the global environmental commons are a public interest of concern to all people. This article argues for the need to critically research the challenges and risks associated with the rapid datafication of the environment, specifically in relation to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for climate change (13), the ocean (14), biodiversity (15) and inclusive and accountable institutions (16). More knowledge is needed of how the SDGs and their supporting networks influence data-generation on a mediated planet, and how issues of access to and use of environmental data, as well as data ownership and AI implementation, can best be navigated. We contend that such knowledge can help enhance the democratic potential of the SDGs to build public trust and secure broad participation in global environmental governance in ways that also support peaceful and inclusive societies, as promised by SDG 16.

In the 1960s, Spaceship Earth expressed a new way of perceiving the Earth as a singular and solitary planet in the universe. Spaceship Earth articulated and inspired an understanding of the planetary environment as a unified system that provided unique and increasingly fragile conditions of life. In spite of being coined in the techno-optimist decade of the Space Race and its high hopes of extending human life to other planets, Spaceship Earth integrated the buoyant science fact and science fiction of spaceflight with a growing sense of global crisis. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) impacts our journey in reaching the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals in more ways than one. In the WASP-HS report “AI, sustainability and Agenda 2030”, the conclusions from the community reference meeting that took place on October 4, 2023, are presented. The contribution formulates and discusses the following challenges: First, that the desire to make environmental data politically actionable in immediate ways is understandable but requires carefully qualifying the aims. Data circulation accelerates various forms of data use, including commercial and for-profit use. Second, that data accommodates different stakeholder views and opposing interests. The same data sets can support diverging understandings of “sustainability”.

Was verbindet einen Vulkanausbruch in Indonesien mit einer Hungersnot in Europa? Was hat die Wasserhygiene mit der Ausbreitung von Seuchen zu tun? Umwelt bedeutet, in Zusammenhängen zu denken.

What connects a volcanic eruption in Indonesia with a famine in Europe? What does water hygiene have to do with the spread of epidemics? Environment means thinking in context.

This paper studies the new repositories of specimens and knowledge that emerged from Sweden's first “phytotron,” a modern climate laboratory for plant research established in Stockholm in the 1960s. Different aspects and scales of technoscientific plant and crop growth came together under one roof: inhouse trials on the timing and spacing of trees and crops, postwar domestic policies to modernize a largely rural country, and Swedish forest geneticists' expertise in international efforts to improve forest stand and productivity globally. I argue that a scalar analysis of scientific forestry can help identify and assess the historical contingencies and contexts that formed the interventions in planetary order invoked by the Anthropocene.